pchvykov

So I recently went on a Vipassana retreat, which is a fun little experience that involves being silent for 10 days and meditating 11 hours each day. Needless to say, that sort of situation necessarily leads to all sorts of interesting experiences and ideas. Among them, one I found especially peculiar is that I distinctly started feeling some sort of sensations outside of my body. Aside from my rational mind, which kept saying that this should not be possible, the truth of my subjective experience of this was clear. Of course, I got really excited and started exploring these sensations more systematically. It seemed that when I was sitting quietly and peacefully, these sensations were like subtle uniform tingling in the space around my body, though with a non-uniform shape. In front of me, this “field” felt like it extended about 2-3 feet, while behind my back it was very thin, if not missing entirely. If this seems oddly specific for such a strange subjective phenomenon, I need to give a bit more context of what Vipassana is all about. The premise of this meditation technique is that we spend so much of our lives caught up in our imaginary stories and projections into the future or memories of the past, that we start to confuse our reality and our imagination, forgetting what is the true actual real present “here” experience. And the only thing that is really here and true are our pure sensory inputs in this moment. When you are sitting in a largely dark, quite, clean hall, the only sensory input you actually have is that of touch. So the focus of the meditation is just to observe these tactile sensations for hours and hours on end. The key point here is not to imagine them, and to constantly check yourself that you’re really not imagining them, and then notice that you, in fact, are imagining them and to stop imagining anything! Turns out it’s nearly impossibly to observe sensations without imagining anything. If I want to feel the sensations on my left leg, I som